So You Want to Go Paleo? Hope You’re Not in a Hurry

Supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and coffee shops have made our lives a lot easier: These modern conveniences have allowed us to forget how excruciatingly difficult it was for our ancestors to find a consistent supply of food.

With grocery stores and modern appliances, making a plate of eggs and bacon with a cup of coffee would take a total time of about 15 minutes, if that, once you got the ingredients home from the grocery store.

Here's how you'd make breakfast the real paleo way: In order to secure a side of bacon, you would have to find and kill a pig, butcher the meat, trim and salt the pork belly, cure the meat (which can take up to seven days), rinse and dry the meat, set up a fire pit, smoke the meat, and finally cook the preserved bacon. Making the eggs is a little simpler. You would only have to gather the eggs from a roosting bird, heat a stone on the coals of a fire, and cook the eggs. At this point, breakfast seems pretty straightforward as long as you possess basic tracking and meat-processing skills, but the real hold up would come from your morning cup of coffee. After the dark red coffee cherries are picked, they need to be dried for at least two weeks. After drying, the beans need to be hulled, roasted, ground, brewed, and, finally, strained.

It would take you 19 labor-intensive steps and between 15 and 20 days to put breakfast on the table (or rock in this case), according to Kettle and Fire’s step-by-step comparison. And you thought that line for the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru was bad…